PXE Boot Virtual PC? Can You?

[soveryapt]

Simple question, can you PXE Boot Virtual PC? If so, how?

Basically, I've been building a new image (between all the other jobs, you all know how it is) and I've used Virtual PC as, basically, the school has bugger all resources to be able to buy anything.

Thanks in advance.
Andy

[Heebeejeebee]

You can certainly PXE boot a virtual box setup in Hyper-V since we do it here for testing (test/wipe etc). Don't think you can with Virtual PC though.

... however you may be also to mount a PXE boot cd in Virtual PC and do it that way though.

Cheers

HBJB

[soveryapt]

You can certainly PXE boot a virtual box setup in Hyper-V since we do it here for testing (test/wipe etc). Don't think you can with Virtual PC though.

... however you may be also to mount a PXE boot cd in Virtual PC and do it that way though.

Cheers

HBJB

Hmmm .. that's worth a shot ..

[Cache]

The Virtual PC will have a MAC address allocated to it and (assuming you use Microsoft Virtual PC, although I'm sure VMWare does the same) when no there's no valid boot device, such as CD or Hard drive, will try to PXE boot, just alter the bios boot order as you normally would or enter the boot menu I believe.

[srochford]

You can definitely do it with VMWare Server and Player (both free) and Virtual Box (also free) so if you get stuck with Virtual PC then just use one of the other virtualisation products.

This is a good way of building the image - it's what we do.

[vikpaw]

As above, i've seen my vm's on vmware show the pxe boot up screen.

Understanding boot order with Virtual PC 2007 - Virtual PC Guy's WebLog - Site Home - MSDN Blogs

[soveryapt]

You can definitely do it with VMWare Server and Player (both free) and Virtual Box (also free) so if you get stuck with Virtual PC then just use one of the other virtualisation products.

This is a good way of building the image - it's what we do.

As above, i've seen my vm's on vmware show the pxe boot up screen.

Understanding boot order with Virtual PC 2007 - Virtual PC Guy's WebLog - Site Home - MSDN Blogs

See, I was looking at the pay for systems .. I'll DL them now (whilst I have some form of decent internet) and check out that link .. thanks guys ..

[p858snake]

I'm sure you can do it in Virtual PC..... because i've done it in class from memory (If I had it installed I would have a quick look), Make sure network is ticked and activated in the boot order.

[m25man]

You can make or download a PXE boot floppy/cd image and boot Virtual PC from that, used to do it all the time before Virtualisation and WDS became mainstream.

[soveryapt]

Thanks for all your replies. I managed to get it working in Virtual PC (thought I'd give it a try before building a new image as I've got staff tying the 7th out of the 13 knots in the noose! lol).

Basically, I did the following (based on peoples responses so thanks to those who advised):

1. Go into the settings for the Virtual Machine
2. Find network adapters and change it to be "Shared Network (NAT)"
3. Also, turn off the Integration Features (i.e. uncheck the Enable at Startup)
4. Start the virtual Machine and press DEL during startup
5. This takes you to the BIOS screen where you can set the network as first boot priority
6. Once you've set it, save and exit (normall F10)
7. Allow the machine to start and it should go to PXE Boot Screen and find your network
8. Finish the process however you capture (WDS / FOG / Etc)

Thanks to the few pointers (I don't know why I didn't think of pressing DEL in the first place!) that made me be able to sort this. When I have time, I'll still take a look at VM Player and Server.

Whoop .. now to wait for this to upload and test on an unsuspecting machine in the ICT Lab .. lol ..

[jtotheb]

Simple question, can you PXE Boot Virtual PC? If so, how?

Assuming you're trying to PXE boot to a server the physical PC can connect to. Bind the Virtual PCs NIC to the physical adapter of the PC. Settings->Networking.

When you start the Virtual PC hit DEL to go into its "BIOS" and set PXE as the first boot option.

Exit the BIOS saving the changes and then when it restarts it will go straight into PXE boot.

(Edit: You'd worked it out as I was typing :-) - NAT will work. If you bind the Virtual PC directly to the physical NIC the Virtual PC will get its own separate lease)

[soveryapt]

(Edit: You'd worked it out as I was typing :-) - NAT will work. If you bind the Virtual PC directly to the physical NIC the Virtual PC will get its own separate lease)

Thanks anyway though!

[soveryapt]

Gah .. Ok, so part 1 is done with in terms of getting the VM to PXE Boot, however, issue 2 has arisen.

I'm trying to capture the image that I have created in Virtual PC, but when I load the Capture Image (using WDS) there is no volume in the "choose volume to capture" drop down.

Anyone got any ideas?

Ta

[jtotheb]

Have you got 512 Meg or more of RAM allocated to the Virtual PC? If not allocate more RAM.

Did you run sysprep prior to attempting to capture an image? If not run sysprep.

In WDS press shift + F10 to bring up a command prompt. Can you do a dir c: (or possibly d? If you can't see the drive at the command prompt then it points to storage drivers. What wim is your WDS using to boot into capture?

[vikpaw]

It's not because it's NATted is it? Did you do that binding of network adapter that was suggested above..?